HOT PANTS!

Dolce and Gabbana Fashion Week

The Italian luxury fashion house is the focus of the Milan Fashion Week where we get a first-hand look at Dolce & Gabbana’s fabulous Autumn Winter collection for 2014-15, entitled ‘Enchanted Sicily’. Designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana met in Milan in 1980 while they were both working for the same fashion house. Their first women’s collection was presented to Milan’s fashion elite in 1985 and have been turning heads and lightening pocketbooks every since. They produce clothing, footwear, jewellery, watches, handbags, accessories, cosmetics and perfume. Some of the celebrities that don the D&G label are Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Beyonce, Sienna Miller, Chloe Sevigny, Katy Perry, Naomi Watts, Emma Stone, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kim Kardashian, Chloe Moretz, Daisy Lowe, Isla Fisher, Zoe Saldana and Tinie Tempah.

This fantasy-world collection is full of charming animal appliques, key motif, floral prints, capes, boots, fur coats, fashionable handbags and clutches, pantsuits, gossamer evening gowns, dresses, beaded headwear, suits, leggings and cropped pants. The style of this collection looks like it was taken straight from a fairy tale – picture every Disney fairy tale made that has a knight, a princess and a fair maiden and then add Red Riding Hood. But what really can be said about this collection other than it leaves you breathless, speechless and wanting more, more, more? Well, just how many collections include designs taken straight from Elizabethan times and the armour worn in that era? Here you’ll find armoured boots, greaves, gauntlets, and an updated version of chain mail. You’ll also find tweeds, silks, woollens, brocades, embroidery, appliques, satin, and jewel encrusted fabric – all things to be dreamt of and yet never realized in one opulent collection.

All of the garments in the collection are praiseworthy, memorable and a feast for the eyes. There were a few, however, that bare mentioning: Grullo and Silver heavy silk and woollen brocaded tunic with three quarter length butterfly sleeves over a matching mid-thigh length jumper; fingerless metal and bead encrusted gauntlets, and; the pièce de résistance, jewel-encrusted chain mail-like hood, which extends down across the upper chest and shoulders. For those of a kinder and gentler nature, there were a number of twill tunic dresses also accessorized with chain mail-like headwear and jewel-encrusted gauntlets and a truly wondrous Crimson silk diaphanous dress with laced bodice and puffed elbow-length sleeves.

And no fairy tale would be complete without Red Riding Hood: diaphanous full-length silk dress with billowing strips of fabric that attach to the hand via rings, all in a squirrel/owl motif. And what Red Riding Hood would be caught without her hood? In this case it is a Crimson and black striped fur hood. All in all, an amazing collection.